Soul of a People

advance praise for soul of a peopleA wonderful and engaging book . . . David Taylor's Soul of a People will make you secretly wish that you could have been one of the thousands of writers who, during the height of the Depression, set out to paint an intimate portrait of a nation and its people. Taylor illuminates this history of the Federal Writers' Project with impressive research and deft storytelling.—Robert Whitaker, author of On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a NationDuring the Great Depression, the federal government paid out-of-work writers to capture American voices on paper. But Soul of a People is the first book to tell the stories of the Federal Writers themselves. In David Taylor's engaging narrative, this spunky, colorful, and entertaining crew comes back to life.—Ann Banks, editor of First Person America, an anthology of oral histories collected by the Federal Writers' ProjectThis intimate portrait of the Writers' Project, a gem of FDR's New Deal, is a nostalgic journey through America in the Depression Era. Familiar faces dot every corner, young writers from Studs Terkel to Richard Wright, John Cheever to Ralph Ellison. It's a journey well worth taking, a key formative moment in our literary common culture, well written and nicely researched.—Kenneth D. Ackerman, author of Young J. Edgar: Hoover, the Red Scare, and the Assault on Civil LibertiesLong before Oprah and blogs, the WPA during the Great Depression of the 1930s gave America its first mass exercise in reading and writing—the Federal Writers' Project. Now David Taylor goes inside the project to give us intimate snapshots of the writers and what they saw and felt during that hard time. Soul of a People is a revealing and valuable resource.—Nick Taylor, author of American-Made: The Enduring Legacy of the WPADavid Taylor has added a perfect chapter to the amazing saga of the Federal Writers' Project, with vivid portraits of some of the men and women who produced the American Guide series, an unmatched collective portrait of a people battered but not beaten by the Great Depression. Soul of a People should be mandatory reading as the storm clouds of hard times hover over us again.—Bernard Weisberger, editor of The WPA Guide to America